I don't want to say I told you so... but I told you so. On the 10th of January this year, in fact.

I'm the most awesome guy ever!!!!!!

To be honest, it's not even that undeniable fact about me being awesome, but more that I've generally had - across 26 years of writing about games - a pretty good sense of things. My tastes in gaming lean towards the more mainstream end of things, see. I've learned that if I like or dislike the idea of something... the majority tend to be feeling the same. I'm fundamentally quite lazy in terms of how I consume my entertainment, and I suspect most people are the same. 

Inevitably, when I predicted the imminent mainstream arrival of cloud-based gaming, I was told I was wrong, that the world isn't ready, that consoles were going to be around forever, and... blah blah.

Well, Google appears to disagree with you.

Its new Stadia platform - which you surely don't need me to recap here, but it's a cloud-based gaming system that will work on essentially any screen, and the only hardware Google will sell is a joypad - was announced yesterday at a Game Designers Conference Keynote.

The timing of this is really quite pertinent, because I had an update earlier this week about the new Atari VCS console - which I backed mostly because I thought it'd be funny - and as I was reading how it has been delayed because they're making the hardware EVEN BETTER... I couldn't escape the sense that what they're trying to achieve is ultimately futile.

I don't think anybody is expecting this VCS thing to be able to compete with Sony and Microsoft, but the succession of bigger and better hardware feels old fashioned now. With the leap between the previous generation of consoles and the current one being virtually imperceptible to most people, it feels like that part of gaming history belongs in the past. 

Biffo and Larry Bundy Jr take a look at the Treamcast - a rare portable Sega Dreamcast, and attempt a little play on Crazy Taxi!

Suffice to say, video games don't have the greatest reputation for successfully making the jump to live action. From the travesty that was the Super Mario Bros. movie, to the early impressions of the forthcoming Sonic The Hedgehog films, you'd think they'd have given up by now.

Indeed, wisdom would suggest that video games would have greater success with animation, but the legacy - as suggested by these 10 American cartoon series - proves otherwise...

So, I was playing Far Cry New Dawn, and a non-player character died. This was a significant death. It marked the end of one chapter of the story. There was a funeral. Other characters were all sad and that. 

And I didn't have a clue who the dead guy was.

More pertinently, I didn't care. In fact, I just got annoyed that they were telling me that this was a major turning point in the game, rather than giving me what I needed to feel it. 

Contrast this with Red Dead Redemption 2. In that, when a certain character died, I felt genuine sadness. Likewise that bit in The Last of Us, when Joel (spoilers) gets impaled on a bit of rebar. In both those cases I didn't want anything bad to happen to those characters. It was a shock, and I was shocked that I was shocked, because I'm so used to not caring what happens to video game characters.  

In New Dawn, the dead character's deadness was preceded by him being tortured. Clearly, the creators of the game felt this would heighten the tragedy when he was then shot in the face. Indeed, my character was so enraged by this, that he turned into a sort of Incredible Hulk, and started punching the dead characters' murderers. All out of my control, of course. 

But... I didn't know who he was, I didn't know a thing about him, I didn't understand why it was being treated as a major turning point in the story. I felt nothing, other than a bit of confusion, and impatience, because I wanted to get back to the gameplay.

And I'll tell you why this is: cut-scenes. All of Far Cry New Dawn's storytelling is done via cutscenes, and the examples above, both good and bad, have finally gotten to the core of why I've disliked cutscenes ever since they started becoming a thing.

In a break from our usual programming, Biffo, Gannon, Octav1us and Larry Bundy Jr ask themselves the question: why do they do YouTube? The honesty of their answers may surprise you...

The Man's Daddy returns with more of his hilarious comedy jokes, and even shares some of his summer holiday slides!

Something Sony is often credited for is helping gaming grow up. When it launched the PlayStation, it set itself apart from Sega and Nintendo, with advertising that was grittierr, darker, and more obscure. 

As the PlayStation family grew, so did the self-conscious edginess of its advertising. Nowhere was this more true than Europe, where PlayStation ads would go out of their way to court controversy - bringing its own reward by sparking moral indignation and public outrage. 

Here's a gallery featuring some of Sony Europe's most baffling attempts to shock. 

Revealed for the first time ever - Larry Bundy Jr and Paul Gannon explore the full, strange, tale of the 1980s electronic toy called Winkie...

So, here's a question that has been rumbling around in my head... is retro gaming sort of, y'know... over?

​I mean, there'll always be a place for nostalgia. People will always want to remember the things that have meant something to them. Today's young gamers will be tomorrow's retro gamers.

But... has the retro gaming mediasphere - for want of a better word - reached critical mass, and outward expansion has now ceased?

There are podcasts, websites, shows... and it feels like every other day a new retro gaming YouTube channel starts up. It feels like that big ball in Katamari Damacy, and every day it just gets bigger and bigger as more YouTubers are stuck to it, and if you're new it's impossible to stand out.  

Indeed, finding content for this site and the YouTube channel - which hasn't already been covered in some form or other - is incredibly difficult.

Yes, I know... it doesn't so much matter if it has been covered before, so long as I can find my own take on a topic, but I want to surprise and educate not only you lot - but myself as well. I'm sort of seeing it almost as a game, a challenge to myself, to find stuff that's obscure, and hasn't been covered.

It's tricky though - the likes of my Digitiser co-host Larry Bundy Jr have been doing their thing for years, and between the titans of retro gaming, and the billions of smaller channels - some doing utterly amazing work, others not so much - I do have days where I get a little despondent, wonder whether Digitiser has anything meaningful to contribute, and ask if it's worth it.

In the 80s - with popular culture violating my still-brewing brain with the message that a nuclear holocaust could happen at any minute - most of my nightmares were about nuclear war. Between Frankie's Two Tribes, Threads, The Day After, The Terminator, When The Wind Blows, Protect And Survive et al, it's no exaggeration to say that I lost count of the times I woke up shrieking and ululating in terror. It seemed like an inevitability. 

What do kids even have nightmares about these days? Brexit, probably. Or not having enough credit on their phone. Or their latest ASMR slime video being demonetised.

Oddly, I always survived my post-apocalyptic dreams. It was never the dying that scared me, but living on having lost everything familiar. Interestingly, Far Cry New Dawn plays entirely on this fundamental fear by revisiting the familiar world of Far Cry 5, 17 years after the events of its mushroom cloud-shaped climax (one of three possible endings).

In the new-look Hope County, your goal is to reestablish civilisation... but your efforts are threatened by The Highwayman, a band of biker leather-wearing goons, governed by a pair of psychotic twin sisters. Though you won't need to have played FC5 to understand what's going on, it surprised me that it's much more of a direct sequel than I'd anticipated. 

This isn't the first time Ubisoft have done something like this, of course. Far Cry 3 led to the Blood Dragon expansion, a glorious, 1980s VHS-tinged, cyber-noir shooter. New Dawn isn't quite as bold with its aesthetics, but instead offers a full-sized game, which reuses and remixes elements of Far Cry 5 to surprisingly decent effect. 

As I alluded to on the letters page last week, Digitiser now has a second channel, which will act as a lewd depository for all the more - ahem - esoteric stuff that I like making.

It'd be nice if you subscribed, for the full, panoramic, Digitiser experience. But if you don't want to... that's fine. That's the whole point.

Thus, above you have the video from the regular Digitiser channel - myself, Octav1us, Gannon and Larry attempting to answer gaming trivia questions, and being given electric shocks in return for failure. And below you have Eli Silverman from Cheap Show and Barshens reading a beautiful fairytale about a lonely carpenter and his wooden son...

Exodus, movement of Jah people, oh yeah,
Open your eyes and let me tell you this,
Exodus, movement of Jah people,
Exodus, movement of Jah people.

​And so on and so forth. 

It's weird how real-life tragedy inspires art. If the atom bombs hadn't dropped on Japan in 1945 would we have had Godzilla? Without 9/11 there'd have been no Cloverfield. And without the Chernobyl disaster we wouldn't have had Dmitri Glukhovsy's novel Metro 2033, which inspired the Metro video game series. 

When I visited Chernobyl 10 years ago, I was surprised by how much it affected me, particularly walking through the eerily empty city of Pripyat. It was clearly the perfect setting for a video game, despite being ground zero for an unspeakable tragedy.

Weirdly, one of my overriding memories is of a heavily pregnant dog wandering around outside the crippled, decaying, power plant, while we took in the scene and posed for photos. It was surreal and disturbing. 

Quite by chance, my trip coincided with a competition being run by Marillion - yes, ha ha, Mr Biffo likes Marillion - to win VIP tickets to one of their bi-annual Marillion Weekends; you had to take a photograph of yourself wearing one of the band's t-shirts. Naturally, I donned a shirt featuring the cover of their 1998 album Radiation (which I had to beg off a fellow fan, as I didn't own one; it's a horrible design).

Sort of inevitably, I won the competition, got the VIP tickets, met the band, and told them of my trip.

And then a few years later, their guitarist Steve Rothery released a pleasant instrumental solo album called The Ghosts of Pripyat. Was I directly responsible for that? I like to think so. Even though when I told him about my visit, the most overt response I got was a slight nod, and perhaps a mumbled "Oh right..." 

But those cogs must've surely been turning in his head...

Shortly after its release in 1980, the arcade shoot 'em up Berzerk was associated with a string of mysterious deaths. Digitiser explores this dark and strange tale...